


this dream of you

by captainkilly



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Malark deserves good things okay, so I wrote him a very good thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:00:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29312970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: It starts off as a joke between them. An actual marriage isn't on the cards, not really, and they're certainly having plenty fun without it. But then his letters come, with all his grief scrawled out in the pages, and somehow it's not really that much of a joke anymore at all..
Relationships: Donald Malarkey/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	this dream of you

**Author's Note:**

> For [howunexpectedlyso](https://howunexpectedlyso.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr, who gave me this prompt for Malark: _'marry me?' started as a teasing joke between friends, but eventually they both wish it wasn't just a joke_. I really, really enjoyed writing this one! I don't write a lot of Malark overall, so this was a nice test of my writing that really did catapult me into loving him just that much more.

* * *

The pub in Aldbourne is a noisy affair. One has to shout down the bar just to get one drink, let alone a whole round, and the amount of sound that currently reverberates off the walls will probably leave her ears ringing later on tonight. She’s seen most of the locals make a clean escape in the face of a veritable invasion of Americans, even when some of the town’s old guard is holding court and regaling the most boyish-looking soldiers with stories of another war.

“Have you seen Flo?” she almost shouts in Diana’s ear.

Diana turns, rolls her eyes, and jerks her head in the general direction of the benches that line the wall. She traces her friend’s disdain all the way to the far corner, where she can see a very pleased-looking Flo getting really cozy with –

“Fuck, is she really going for _Floyd_?”

“Yup.” Diana pops the affirmation as loudly as possible. “Flo and Floyd. It’s tragic.”

“It’s _madness_!” Sarah shakes her head. “Didn’t she hear _anything_ those other girls said last week? It’s like she sees a pretty face and goes ‘this does not apply to me’.”

“What did the other girls say?”

Sarah snorts out a laugh. Swats at the red-haired soldier who’s now seated himself beside her in a bid to uncover all the latest gossip. “None of your damn business, Don!”

“Hey, this is about my buddy, I demand to know.”

“As if you don’t know what all the girls say about _that_ one,” she snorts as she leans closer to him just to be heard over the din of the music and laughter. “Good for a roll in the hay, but will balk at the first chime of wedding bells.”

Donald Malarkey weighs her words. Takes a long sip of his beer, then nods in agreement. There’s a small smile playing around his mouth that makes her hit his arm in warning.

“Don’t you _dare_ tell him we’re onto him!” she shouts, eliciting a noise of assent from Diana beside her. “Don, I swear, if you tell him I’m gonna – ugh!”

“Wedding bells, huh?” He asks instead, slowly lowering his glass and not signaling for another drink. “That what you girls want?”

“Some of us!” crows Diana. Sarah hisses as her friend’s elbow lands in her side none too gently. “Me? I have just found a date with destiny. Excuse me, folks.”

Don’s eyebrows almost disappear into his hairline as he watches rather tall and willowy Diana take her leave and make a beeline for George Luz.

“She’s been making eyes at him all week,” confides Sarah, giggling as she watches the so-called date with destiny unfold somewhere between the game of darts and the bar. “It was terribly exhausting, between her talking about George non-stop and Flo making eyes at.. well..” She rolls her eyes, but smiles. “And, yes, to answer your question, _some_ of us do eventually want the wedding bells to happen. When we’re done living in sin and all that.”

She sets her own drink down on the table. Fidgets in place now that Don, beside her, has gone far more silent than she’s used to. It’s usually Muck and Penkala making the noise, now that she thinks about it – and both of them couldn’t make it out tonight. She’s not sure what’s on his mind, now, though she’s caught him glancing at her half a dozen times in all the other nights and had been perfectly aware of what he was thinking then.

“Well, I wasn’t going to do it this way,” says Don, then, decisive but winking at her in a conspiratorial way that tells her he’s none too serious, “but you leave me absolutely no choice, ma’am.”

“Oh?” Sarah leans closer to him, fully aware of his hand on her bare knee and that small smile he only seems to smile at her. She lowers her voice. Leans in so close that her lips brush his ear. “Did I force your hand, soldier?”

“Marry me,” he says, and she bursts into laughter at the barely-concealed mirth with which he says it. They’re both laughing on this bench in the middle of the pub – slightly drunk, slightly enamored – and she knows he doesn’t mean a damn thing even when his hand squeezes her knee and his face is almost void of jokes. “Sarah, I’m serious, you gotta –”

“This is the least romantic proposal I’ve ever heard,” she grins, and kisses his cheek. “I love it.”

“Did it work?” His grin is positively impish, now. “Can we get the hell outta here already?”

She looks at the glasses that have only a small spill of beer still inside them. Looks at Diana, now draped around George’s neck and laughing up a storm, and at the already empty corner Flo was seated in before. Smirks as she turns back to face Don.

“Lead the way, future husband.”

* * *

She likes Don most like this. His arm is wrapped around her shoulders and she gets to rest her head against him without feeling like she’s going to be chased out of this space once he comes to his senses. She gets to touch him, after, when they’re done laughing and making messes of each other, and he never tells her to stop.

His lips rest against her forehead a moment, warm and inviting, and she smiles before she presses a kiss to his chest.

“I do like this living in sin part,” he murmurs, hand lazily drawing circles on her waist.

“So do I,” she giggles, reaching up and planting a kiss just beside his mouth right as she dares wrap one leg over his. “It’s fun like this. With you.”

“Sarah –”

“Yes, my esteemed husband who will never be my husband?”

“Oh,” he says, and blinks, “I wasn’t sure you’d caught –”

“Don, I’ve known you how long now? Of course I knew it was a joke.” She stretches out and drapes herself half over him, because that’s who she is and that’s what she’s always done with him. “I don’t know you the way wives are supposed to know a husband. Know you better than some wives know their husband, though, where some noises you make are concerned.”

His hand tightens in her curls a moment. “I hope you’ll get a husband who’ll keep up with you. Jesus.” He laughs and manages to sound amazed. The kiss he gives her is sloppy, tinged with sleep, but she groans assent as his tongue teases her upper lip before he pulls away. “You’re so demanding, unbelievable.”

“Oh, I’m demanding? Me?” She nudges him. “What about you, mister we-can-go-another-round? That last one was all on you.”

“And you didn’t have to work for that one at all, now did you?”

She giggles. Blushes at the memory of his head between her thighs. He’d brushed affection against her skin with his lips, just as his tongue’s movements made her clap her hand in front of her mouth to keep from screaming. She loves Don most like that, when his hands wrap around her hips and thighs and hold her in place when she most wants to move.

She doesn’t say that, because they’re not that sort of couple and this isn’t any sort of love story.

“I liked that round,” she murmurs, tracing patterns of her own on his skin and watching goosebumps appear in the wake of her fingers. “I’ll miss it when you fly out there, you know.” It’s the closest she’ll get to saying she’ll really kind of miss him. She smirks, then weakens the heaviness of him leaving her. “I guess I’ll have to keep my hands busy when you’re gone.”

“You could write to me.”

“Not that kind of busy!” she laughs, at first, but then his hand comes to rest on her inner thigh and she knows he got the hint all the same. She snorts out another laugh, then comes up sober at the implication of what he just said. “Are you serious? Could I write to you?”

“Yeah, I’ll give you what you need to know to make sure I get the letter.”

“And you can write back?”

“Sarah, on my honor as your esteemed husband,” he laughs, “I promise you I will write back. Middle of a war zone or not. Just don’t do anything to get censored, okay?”

“Oh?” Her smile curves into wickedness, but that’s fine because she sees it mirrored on his face too. “Do enlighten me what censorship would have a field day with..”

“Demanding.” A kiss on her lips. “Little.” A kiss on her collarbone. “Fake.” He smirks at her noise of protest, then offers the addendum: “Wife.”

“Don!” she shrieks, laughing as he pulls her atop him. “You insufferable –”

* * *

War’s nothing to laugh at.

She knows this, of course, as well as anyone else who’s lived the past few years having the earth pulled out from beneath their feet every time. It’s busy work, what she does, providing a listening ear and some normalcy in the midst of the bombs dropping and wounded men returning as shells of who they used to be.

Sarah fakes a smile with the best of them. She laughs in all the right places. Tells stories with the air of “gosh, that was a real kicker” and chews her bubblegum in a way that pops different from a gunshot.

Sparingly, the letters come. She cradles them to her chest, folds her hands around the creases of the envelopes, traces his untidy scrawl of her name – _Sarah Shaw_ , the S-es looped in a flourish – with her fingertips long before she dares open them. She writes back more than he – takes a whole bundle to the post office at once, then winces at the pitying looks some of the older ladies in town give her. She smiles her best smile in the face of that, too, even when her stomach wrenches itself into knots.

Don sees more than he writes. She’s sure of it, at times, when his words seem to trail off into nothing or his sentences end so abruptly she thinks bullets must have interrupted his thoughts. Still, he writes, and it’s nothing like the Don she knows but it sounds like him in all the little remarks he pens into the margins all the same.

He tells her more than the newspapers write about. About how Eindhoven’s liberation was cast in shadow – _the women,_ he’d written, _I was so glad you weren’t there to see_ – and how everything had turned into ‘an impressive clusterfuck’ (which she’d giggled at before she’d realized) somewhere around Arnhem.

He writes to her always as _dear wife_ , like a joke that keeps building until it feels like something of reality in the stories of home he tells her. She knows the names of his whole family, commits them to her mind like a prayer in case he doesn’t come home and they will need someone to tell them all the news, and it’s not long before she can sketch him out in her mind as well. She doesn’t have trouble uniting the story of gap-toothed, freckled Donnie with the bark of laughter and squeeze of her hips that she tries to hold in her head when she’s sheltering in place and praying for things she dares not ask out loud.

He jokes a _marry me_ before he signs off, always, unquestioning, and she doesn’t have the heart to write back anything but _yes, marry me_.

She writes back more than that, of course, keeping the air of _my stupid husband off to join the circus_ alive because she remembers how he’d laughed up in that hayloft when she’d phrased his desire to go to war like that. Her stories are scattered on the pages, but she leaves her best anecdotes in the margins. She writes of life back home, in a city where nobody bothered to learn her name and she’d always come home with scraped knees and something of a fight brewing in her lungs, and writes of life announcing its arrival in weddings and birthdays and births aplenty until she thinks she will run out of names to remind him that they are what he’s fighting for.

When the letter comes, some time in winter, it’s smudged around the edges as though it’s forgotten it’s supposed to exist in this reality.

 _Sarah,_ he starts, this time, and she sinks to the floor of her bathroom and thinks she could fill her whole bathtub with the tears that shake loose from that place deep down where she keeps all her fear. _Skip and Penk are – they’re – there wasn’t anything left. There wasn’t anything._

She loses him between the words, between the lines, as he scrawls other terrors out – _Toye and Guarno lost their legs_ – and refers to pain as though it’s something wild – _Buck lost himself in the woods and I don’t know how he’s gonna come back_ – and doesn’t seem anything like the Don she remembers wrapped around her body and whispering gentle nothings right before she goes to sleep. The only thing, nearly unchanged, at the bottom of the page, is the _marry me_.

Sarah stares at the question mark that never once followed the declaration in the other letters. Hates how he made it a question, as if there’s something of a punchline to it that he’s hoping will knock him out of existing.

She curls around this letter, folds it into the space between her heart and her clothes, keeps it with her for a week before she sits down at her kitchen table and cries out a response.

 _Don,_ she writes, so decisively even when she feels like she can’t keep his head above water anymore, _I’m here._ She thinks on her next words too long, but spills them out in scattered writings and fills the margins with so much she hasn’t said. She talks about the silence that follows every bombing, here where she is stationed, and how it’s so much worse when the crying finally starts and you know there’s something of loss that fell out of the skies again. She mentions how lost she’d been after her mother, after her mom, after _mommy_ – and she cries _I don’t think there’s a word in English for how goodbyes like that feel_ and thinks Don’s going to understand just fine when there are some things she just can’t speak about.

 _Of course I’ll marry you,_ she signs, _I’ve been yours this long, and I know you like no other._

* * *

The end of war sees her in France. Amid the rubble, handing out donuts like all taste of them doesn’t turn to ash in her mouth by now. Amid the scattered pages of the news that kept breaking over and over again in these weeks, hurtled past her on the breeze that promises it’s almost summer, and she closes her eyes only against the bright light of the sun when the clouds finally move on from this city.

It’s there she sees him, too, in this city starved by love for the first time in its memory.

“Sarah,” he says, and he’s older and thinner and so drawn that it’s like color itself has faded from his grasp. There’s some ghost of a smile on his lips that she knows – yes, she still knows – and he quips the words out before he can good and well hold them back. “My little fake wife.”

She’s sobbing, she knows, and it’s the ugly kind that turns men away from women and makes her undesirable and like absolutely nothing to write home about. She says his name _Don, Don, Donald, you stupid thing_ and there’s nothing she can hide from him in the rebuke and cry that turns desperate and keening at the sight of him alive, alive, alive.

And, yes, there were letters, after her promise, and he’d never spoken of how serious she’d sounded and she hadn’t dared ask. He’d gone on to talk about his new captain, who he’d finally managed to frighten as they’d stood in Hitler’s own home, and about woodlands that harbored new horrors but also brought some laughter that she could scarcely fathom. He’d gone on to dance around what she’d said, dance circles around her love that she knows was too clear and too much at once, and she hadn’t begrudged him any of that – not even when he’d signed, as always, with a _marry me_ that never carried another question.

His arms wrap around her so tight, now, tighter than she’s ever dared hold his letters, tighter than he’s ever held her in the nights she’d had with him before. And how different is it now, when he smells like gunpowder and dust and something of spring flowers, when his hands squeeze reassurance into her body and his stubble brushes her cheeks as he embraces her like she’s seen all husbands do their wives.

“Sarah,” he says, and he’s crying, too, sobbing his lost and found into the crook of her neck as her arms tightens around him, “Sarah, please.”

She holds him, of course she does. Holds him like she never has, because she always danced her touches all over his body and only settled to be held by him while the day slowly conquered night. Holds him so tight to her she thinks she’ll suck the breath from his body and find it somewhere in her own lungs, no longer knowing where she ends and he begins to exist, and maybe that’s something of the way love is supposed to live even when she doesn’t know the first thing about love at all.

“Don,” she says, “marry me.”

He searches her face. She can see it in his dark eyes. In the careful gaze, guarded and then so naked and raw that she almost cries out anew, and in the smile that grows the way it used to blossom in her bed so late in the evening after they’d laughed themselves hoarse.

“That’s not a joke, huh,” he whispers.

“Hasn’t been one in a long time,” she replies. “It got kinda old.”

“It’s a good joke, love.” His eyes crinkle into the smile she loves. The one she remembers as being just for her, long before he was hers to start with. “The best one of all.”

He kisses her, then, long and hard and loving, and she thinks she tastes the _yes_ on his lips long before he whispers it against every part of her skin.


End file.
